Stealth is Dead.

From article, "Trump Calls Cost of F-35 Fighter Jet ‘Out of Control"

(President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Monday that the cost of building the military’s next-generation fighter jet, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, had spiraled “out of control,” and he vowed to save billions of dollars on military programs once he enters office next month.

In a Twitter post on Monday morning and a series of comments since last week, the president-elect assailed cost overruns for the Lockheed Martin-built fighter jet that have pushed the project’s cost beyond $400 billion, making the plane the most expensive weapons system in military history.)

And...

From same article, (In an interview on Sunday, and in a speech to supporters in Michigan on Friday, the president-elect accused military officials of failing to negotiate good deals with private-sector contractors because they know they might be hired by the companies after their military service ends.

“The people that are making these deals for the government, they should never be allowed to go to work for these companies,” Mr. Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You know, they make a deal like that, and two or three years later, you see them working for these companies that made the deal.”

Mr. Trump said military officials who are in charge of negotiating multibillion-dollar deals like the F-35 project should be barred for life from employment with the companies that they worked with. That would be an expansion of the president-elect’s proposal that people who work for his administration be barred from lobbying for five years.)

Me, "The problem seems to be an I gotcha problem. These defense contracts are negotiated so as to give the government the best bang for its buck, at the time, but the problem is that once the government signs the contract, these defense contracts start running into all kinds of problems. It could be something overlooked in design. It could be construction workers wanting more pay or better health insurance, or the construction materials have gone up in price. Or, they just undervalued the true cost of the project.

Whatever the reason, our government can't say no to the contractors because they have been promised an important new weapon and they want it despite the cost. 

What should be evident is new policy that states that if the full cost of a project goes over a certain amount it is either killed or the contractor has to eat the costs. The American taxpayer should not be left on the hook paying for a weapon that is being rammed down the government's throat.

One final thing we should look at is the fact do we really need another manned Stealth Fighter? In an age where foreign countries are building new radar systems to detect Stealth, what's the point? 

We are basically creating a vehicle that a person will sit in and has to be protected from being shot down. We could have thousands of Unmanned Flying Vehicles (more commonly knows as drones) built for the same amount of money. These drones, could then be flown over enemy space and sure hundreds could get shot down but most will do their job and return to base. The future is not more stealth. The future is, remove the pilot from the aircraft, and build cheap drones that if they got shot down it doesn't matter. Stealth is dead. And, so is high cost projects."